When Lord Browne published his report on student fees and funding, he claimed it amounted to a "paradigm shift". Rioting students agreed. Fazed by the backlash to Browne, the government gutted his report's key recommendations. But now it has now come up with a "paradigm shift" of its own in the form of a long-delayed white paper.

"Bring back Browne, all is forgiven", one is tempted to cry. At least the Browne report offered a coherent package, however objectionable its treatment of higher education as a commodity. It could have worked. The white paper is just a mess. It won't.

It promises a free market in higher education. It delivers the opposite. Instead of one simple limit on overall student numbers, there will be three caps. One will cover "top" students, those with AAB grades at A-level. This cap will be determined by the vagaries of A-level marking and the willingness of "top" universities to expand (for which there is only limited evidence, because in the Russell Group only the big civics have been interested in growth, and for many universities in the 1994 Group, big has never been beautiful).

The second cap will cover "cheap" students – in other words, those who happen to apply to institutions that charge less than £7,000. But it will only cover some of them, because the government proposes to set a quota – 20,000 places initially. The third cap will apply to all the rest. It will have to be screwed down much more tightly.

The white paper promises deregulation. Again, it delivers the opposite. Reading through the document, it is difficult to discover any significant relaxation of bureaucratic controls – apart from a vague promise to revise the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) financial memorandum and the rather desperate exemption of universities from the "accommodation offset", something to do with the minimum wage apparently (full marks to the civil servant who discovered that one).

The truth is that, to implement the proposals in the white paper, the government will have to give itself (or Hefce) new legal powers over universities. The triple student number cap will have to be policed; access agreements will have to be submitted for approval, with more than a hint that the Office for Fair Access will need greater powers; universities will be obliged to provide detailed information on everything under the sun; far from disappearing, Hefce is to become the lead regulator. This is nationalisation with a vengeance.

The white paper promises that it puts students first. It does the opposite. What about the student with a conditional offer of AAB who gets AAC? In the past, an admissions tutor would have taken a simple decision based on academic grounds. Now, a juggernaut of calculating managers will be needed to grind the numbers to balance off-quota and on-quota students.

Or what about students who want to attend university X charging £8,500 rather than college Y charging £6,000? The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills will put obstacles in their way. As the canny majority of students immediately realised, the white paper's real aim is to drive down fees – and so reduce the funding universities have to meet their needs. Cutting the unit of resource is hardly in the best interests of students.

The white paper promises it promotes social mobility. Again, it does the opposite. The effect of the AAB proposal may well be "dynamic". But it will not increase the total number of places available. It will simply lead to a further polarisation of students with "top" universities crowded even more with "good" students – in other words, those who by and large are socially privileged enough to have attended "good" schools (many of them private).

The plan to allow institutions charging low fees to recruit more students, up to 20,000 extra, will not provide any more places; just worse-funded places. Finally, the suggestion that the government will allow early repayment of loans will overwhelmingly favour the rich and fortunate. Whatever became of Simon Hughes's mission to make higher education fairer?

Of course, the white paper is facilely clever. Who can object to better information for students or a come-back if their teaching is poor – any more than to motherhood and apple pie? So critics start on the back foot. But the real purpose of the white paper is to cut higher education's coat to the Treasury's tight cloth.